And then Nicodemus’s misspelled sentences crumbled into a coruscation of golden sparks.

Chimera’s next words hit Nicodemus like thunder. “GO THEN AND DENY YOUR NATURE! SEEK YOUR EMERALD, YOUR LAPIDARY LIE!”

SUDDENLY BACK IN his body, Nicodemus found himself falling away from the Bestiary. Tears filled his eyes and hot pain tore through his throat.

He was shouting wordlessly.

His tailbone struck ground and shot a jolt of agony up his spine. He fell backward and stared at the ceiling.

“Nico!” exclaimed John. Suddenly the big man was leaning over Nicodemus, bending down to grab his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Nicodemus bellowed, whipping his arm around to cast out a hasty sheet of Magnus.

The spell flashed out into a plate of silver light that smashed into John’s hand. The misspelled text shattered but not before breaking the big man’s ring finger back until it snapped.

John cried out as the spell sent him sprawling backward.

Nicodemus pushed himself away from John. “STAY BACK!” he yelled at Shannon and Deirdre as they stepped toward him.

Hot tears blinded his eyes. Mucus coated his upper lip.

“No one touch me!” he bawled. “No one touch me ever again!”

CHAPTER Forty-one

Nicodemus let go of Shannon, who turned away to vomit Magnus bywords on the ground.

No one spoke as he retched. Azure reformed her textual connection to Shannon and then provided an image of Nicodemus squatting beside him. The firelight made the boy’s green eyes seem darker, more haunted.

“Well?” The old wizard spat out a last bit of the diseased language.

“I consolidated the canker into a single mass at the top of your stomach,” Nicodemus said quietly. “Since I dealt only with that text, I created no new curses. But my touch has made the canker more malicious.”

Shannon looked down at his belly. Indeed, a small stream of silver prose was already leaking into his stomach.

Above them, the cold wind was blowing harder through the trees.

“We must get you to Boann,” Nicodemus said flatly. “Now she can cut out the curse.” He looked at Deirdre. She nodded.

“I still don’t like it,” Shannon grumbled. He thought again about how Nicodemus had come out of the Bestiary, weeping, terrified, and filled with revelations about the prophecies and Language Prime. “What if Fellwroth is waiting for us?”

“He might be,” Nicodemus replied in an exhausted voice. “But it’s our only option now. Chimera has made me the Storm Petrel, made me mutagenic.”

He paused to close his eyes. “I would sooner die than stay this way. Alliance with Boann is my only hope. And she is your only hope, Magister. Only she can cut this canker out of you.”

“He’s right, Shannon,” Deirdre said from the other side of the campfire.

Nicodemus stood. “John, are you all right?”

The big man was crouched beside the fire, gingerly holding his right hand. Shannon had splinted the broken finger with a Magnus passage. “Yes,” John said slowly. “I am fine.”

“John, I am sorry.”

The big man laughed. “I’ll say it again: I’m happier with a broken finger than I would be with a canker curse.”

Through Azure’s eyes, Shannon watched an ivy leaf shudder in the wind. “Very well, if we’re determined to go dashing into danger, let’s do it before it gets too late. I’m old and it’s nearing my bedtime.”

No one laughed.

BEFORE THEY LEFT the ruins, Nicodemus walked into the woods. Making water was his excuse. But as soon as he was away from the firelight, he collapsed.

No tears came. No expression of agony twisted his face. But his chest rose and fell, rose and fell until his fingers and forearms tingled. The world began to spin.

Regaining control, he slowed his breath until the tingling left his fingers. He felt hollow. He was the Storm Petrel, the monster.

The insistent wind rushed through the trees. Beyond their leaves shone the icy light of stars.

He stood and wandered until he found a creek. To his eyes, all living things now radiated Language Prime’s soft cyan light. This allowed him to see the glow of several tiny fish swimming in the black water.

He wrote a net of simple Magnus sentences and used it to pull a fry from the water. With the silvery sentences, he held the tiny fish before his frowning face. He dropped it into his open palm.

The poor creature flopped about in his palm. Nicodemus could feel the thing’s Language Prime text changing every time its cold scales touched his skin. He could feel the power of his spellwriting accelerating the changes.

In only a few moments a shiny black growth bulged out of the fry’s gills. “It’s true,” he mumbled, and his eyes filled with tears.

He killed the fish with a quick, clinching paragraph and watched as its cyan glow began to fade. It took a long time.

At last he dropped the fry and buried his face in his hands.

Before him shone an image of the emerald-small, dark, perfectly lacriform. He tried to feel his fear and anger and self-loathing. But he could feel nothing. So he imagined the emotions becoming light.

He poured the light into the emerald and watched it begin to glow. More and more he poured into the gem until it shone with a brilliance that seemed to penetrate into his body.

When they recovered the gem he would no longer have to be afraid. He would no longer need to feel rage or self-hatred. When they recovered the missing part of himself, he would cease to be a monster.

THE FORESTED HILLS below Starhaven descended in slow undulations for five or six miles to end in the wide oak savanna.

On the border between foothills and grassland, the Westernmost Road stretched its dusty length from Dar in the north down to the City of Rain in the south.

By the time Nicodemus’s party emerged from the forest to stand on the highway, all three moons had risen. The combined glow bathed the savanna in milky blue light.

As he hugged the Index to his chest, Nicodemus surveyed the few farms and oaks that dotted the landscape. Several trees had died and become wiry skeletons.

Save for the homesteads, waist-high savanna grass covered the earth from road’s edge to distant horizon. Here the wind transformed the grassland into an ocean of rolling waves.

Deirdre took their only horse and galloped ahead to scout for danger.

The three men walked in a close huddle, the wind blowing color into their cheeks and tossing Nicodemus’s long raven hair. Azure often ruffled her feathers and issued low, plaintive squawks.

Nicodemus’s keloid began to burn. Shannon had wrapped the scars with distorting Numinous spells. Nevertheless, he watched as a sphere of Language Prime flew away from him in all directions. The broadcast was diffuse; it wouldn’t reveal his precise location to Fellwroth. But it would tell the monster that he was on the move.

Thinking about this made Nicodemus’s heart beat faster. He closed his eyes and focused on recovering the emerald-of transforming himself from Petrel to Halcyon-until his icy determination returned.

Just then Shannon had to pause to vomit silvery logorrhea bywords.

When they continued their trek, Shannon showed him how to write several common language sentences around the Index so that it would float in a slow circle around the younger man’s waist.

“When wizards must fight,” the old linguist said gravely, “we float our spellbooks like this.”

A moment later, Deirdre returned with auspicious news: there was no sign of wizards in Gray’s Crossing. She had learned from a town watchman that shortly after sundown all the black-robes had run up to Starhaven.

After another quarter hour walking, the town came into view around a bend. It was not much to look at: a huddle of round Lornish cottages clustered around two inns, a smithy, a fuller, and a small common. At the hamlet’s center sat the intersection of the Westernmost Road and the smaller road that ran up to Starhaven. Most of the inhabitants were farmers or shopkeepers who sold to the wizards.